More Debian AA1 Tweaking, A Lot More To Do

Just had a little time to screw around with this fresh Debian Lenny install on the AA1.

I adjusted the volume levels and can record and playback decent audio. However, there are some serious problems with video — I can playback from the webcam in mplayer but anything else I’ve tried to record reports back that /dev/video0 can’t be used (except by cheese). That can wait until I try to install Skype. No Skype, no Debian. So webcam could be a deal breaker. The Debian wiki says it works out of the box, lucky says bullshit.

Speaking of BS, I tried to remove cheese but aptitude wanted to remove all of Gnome desktop along with it. I may take it up on that sooner or later.

And while I’m on the subject of desktops, I installed Xfce and jwm. Only made a few tweaks to the jwmrc to keep the apps in the task tray from taking up all that space and replacing xload with wicd and replacing the window manager name with $HOSTNAME. I’ll keep an eye on wicd and see how much of a drain that is on the system. I can live without it. I’ll tweak the interface later with smaller fonts and change things around to suit my tastes. For now, it’s almost default jwm:

I also installed aterm since it doesn’t have any goofy settings to override like the Xfce terminal and Gnome terminal.I installed GNU screen and zile (might install emacs). You can see I installed mksh, too. RAM use is high because I’ve been running a ton of stuff including synaptic.

Still a lot of stuff to tweak on this. Never enough time. More when I get a chance.

Update: Rebooted after I moved the tray to the top (where it belongs). Here’s a better idea of how much RAM this is eating up at boot. First free is before networking was started, second is after wireless was connected.

That’s with cups, bluetooth, IPv6, etc., so I’m hoping to get that a bit lower at some point.